Sometimes a police officer can only stop a fleeing suspect by striking or shooting him. When is it morally justified to use such force rather than let the suspect go? Beginning with deadly force, this article disentangles key considerations. First, it distinguishes justifications for force that are premised on a liability or forfeiture from justifications premised upon lesser-evils considerations. Second, it unpacks the distinct interests the state might claim in subduing suspects, from adjudicating suspects, to punishing criminals, to preventing crime. Drawing these distinctions shows that the state’s interests are weaker than they first appear, rarely sufficient to outweigh the individual’s strong interests against force, and many suspects are not liable to the force to which they are subjected. Ultimately, we conclude (perhaps unsurprisingly) many legally permissible uses of force are morally unjustified. Finally, we turn to ways our analysis can be extrapolated to nondeadly force.
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...
A large segment of the political left identifies as “progressive,” but what does a belief in progress entail? This short essay, written for a...
Our perceptions of what we owe each other turn somewhat on whether we consider “another” to be “an other”—a stranger and not a friend. In this essay...
The Law of the Police, Second Edition provides materials and analysis for law school classes on policing and the law. It offers a resource for...
Evidence law controls what information will be admissible in court and when, how, and by whom it may be presented. It shapes not only the trial...
A crucial first step in addressing intimate-image abuse is its proper conceptualization. Intimate-image abuse amounts to a violation of intimate...
“Dignity” is a rallying cry of social and political movements worldwide. It also appears in legal doctrine and scholarship. But the meaning of dignity...
On January 1, 2022, the most radical change to the American jury in at least thirty-five years occurred in Arizona: peremptory strikes, long a feature...
Although ethical critiques of markets are longstanding, modern academic debates about the “moral limits of markets” (MLM) tend to be fairly limited in...
Many analyses of law take an unsentimental, perhaps even cynical view of regulated actors. On this view, law is a necessity borne of people’s selfish...
Like the federal government, states can apply their laws to people beyond their borders. Statutes can reach out-of-state conduct, such as fraud, that...
How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...
This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The...
Berryessa et al. (2022) consider how prior experience as a criminal prosecutor may influence judicial behaviour, but their concerns about prior...
For several days, former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants in a Georgia election interference case trickled into the Fulton County Jail...
At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...
This chapter examines several ways that the United States takes advantage of international law’s permissiveness and ambiguity to extend its criminal...
Virginia adopted a risk assessment to help determine sentencing for sex offenders. It was incorporated as a one-way ratchet toward higher sentences...